 It's been half a century since Rachel Carson wrote her landmark book, Silent Spring. The Maine Audubon Society invited a panel of experts to examine how far the environmental movement has come in the past 50 years, and how far it has to go. Tom was there and has this report. Rachel Carson was a marine biologist who is credited for starting the environmental movement with the publication of her book, Silent Spring in 1962. Maine Audubon celebrated the 50th anniversary of that publication with a panel discussion about how far we have come since then at their visitor center at Gilzland Farm in Falmouth. Ted Kaufman, Executive Director of Maine Audubon, explains the importance of this issue. Now 50 years later, and Earth Day way back in 1970, what kind of progress have we made in all those decades? Well, we've made some progress, and we know more about the human body and how it relates to some of these toxic chemicals, the effects on the endocrine system and the development of particularly unborn children and young people. But we also find that our government has not become any much more effective anyway in governing what kinds of chemicals get into the marketplace. One of the panelists, toxicologist Dr. Deborah Rice, an expert on the impact of chemicals on human development, gave a presentation on what has been learned about the effects of chemicals on humans and what our next step should be in terms of environmental regulation. We have a much better understanding now about the basic biology of all of us, of us and wildlife animals. And there certainly has been some significant successes in the environmental movement. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act have been tremendous successes in making our rivers cleaner, our air cleaner. It's much cleaner now than it was 50 years ago. But on the other hand, there have been thousands upon thousands of new chemicals put out into the environment that we know virtually nothing about. And regulation, our ability to know about those chemicals and regulate those chemicals has really lagged. Representative Bob Deshane of House District 13, another panelist is a veteran of getting environmental bills passed in the main state legislature. I think what shocks me is how far we haven't come. I think we've gotten better at not poisoning peregrine falcons. We're getting worse about poisoning ourselves. We're discovering all the time new ways that we're hurting ourselves that we never realized before. And every time we discover one, we're not taking adequate steps to address that quickly. Maine is definitely at the forefront. There's probably a dozen to maybe 16 states that have taken some kind of action on chemical policy issues regarding products. Amanda Sears, Associate Director of Environmental Health Strategy Center, the third panelist, talked about Maine's environmental laws as well as federal legislation. Maine has had to act because our federal laws are inadequate to protect us. So we've been doing a lot in Maine to work to fulfill in the gaps on that law, but we need to do that federally as well. So I'm going to be talking with folks about the Safe Chemicals Act, which is a bill before Congress that's going to be hopefully voted on this summer in the Senate to work to protect people from unsafe chemicals. The evening began with a clip from a recent video about Rachel Carson called A Sense of Wonder, followed by a PowerPoint slide presentation by Dr. Rice. Thousands of chemicals, no screening. So this is still 50 years later, this is still the situation. The number of chemicals in commerce now exceeds 84,000. You heard that Rachel Carson was talking about pesticides and very, very high dose application of pesticides. Well, now we have many, many other wonderful chemicals that aren't pesticides. A recent EPA publication stated, there are thousands of chemicals yet to be screened and assessed. An EPA proposes to start looking at fewer than 83 beginning this year. So that's the situation, still the situation 50 years later. During the panel discussion that followed, Amanda Sears pointed out why the federal environmental law past 35 years ago is ineffective. There's really a catch-22 with the law, with the Toxic Substance Control Act, which is called TOSCA, by the way. So if I refer to TOSCA, that's what I mean. And the catch-22 is that the EPA has to already have data in order to require testing. And so they need to, in order to issue testing orders to manufacturers, they can only do that after the EPA has met the significant burden of finding substantial evidence that a chemical may present unreasonable risk. And so in order to gain information about risk, they have to already know information about risk. So really the EPA's hands are tied often about being able to do anything about chemicals. Bob Deshane explained why it is important to take action on a state level. We've been fighting, I think, on a state-by-state basis, because the federal government has failed completely. What happened with TOSCA is really a travesty. It's been cleared for a long time to a lot of states who don't want their kids poisoned, that this has to be fought at the state level. And there's a benefit to that, because when states do their own patchwork approaches, it drives the industry nuts. And even they will start pushing for action at the federal level rather than be regulated on a piecemeal basis. After the panel discussion, there was a question-and-answer session with those who attended. The entire evening's presentation can be seen here on CTN 5 in May. This is Tom Handel in Falmouth for Community Update.